Bring carrier grade, push e-mail to the market. Based on IETF/Lemonade standards.

Granular and light-weight web services to all Comms backend data.

Deliver SyncML support

Improve and expand Outlook Connector

Offer support for better /cheaper storage & mail-store integration.

A connection back to Sun for to better support users

Add a blogging engine to the Comms Suite

Just a partial list of what we are planning, and over the coming months we will be sharing more and more info with you as we get things released. So how are we going to deliver on this? By making significant new investment in sustaining and QA. This will allow us to have developers spend most of their time doing what they are best at - innovating and developing cool new products. Of course this won't all happen at once, but we have a strong server technology base to build on that makes this possible.

To learn more about Sun's Java Communications Suite and how it can help
your business, you can take a look at
http://www.sun.com/bigadmin/hubs/comms/overview/index.jsp

Send your comments and feedback, we believe in our products and we know that Comms on Solaris can be a competitive advantage for you in your business.

Great news!
Here are couple more things to consider:
1. Single-Instance storage or message and attachment deduplication. Especially attachment deduplication, that could be done on storage level by using Data Domain or EMC Centera CAS. To achieve that attachments should be stored on a separate files from .msg.
2. Custom Web interface themes.

Thanks for the news about the future.
Here is an interesting article regarding "Do you really need Sun Weblog Publisher?". If you still want to integrate this into Comms, maybe it's a good idea to contact the StarOffice developers; just to prevent to re-invent the wheel.
http://www.linux.com/article.pl?sid=07/04/12/1912230

I'm really glad that work to improve all of this is happening. Is there any way to get the cal-amer and cal-sfbay servers inside of Sun updated to the latest? I struggle to use these-- they really don't work well at all. I have a negative impression of this product as a result.

Great news - but too late for many I suspect. We are currently running JES but the endless bugs and problems mean that we are seriously looking at moving to Exchange :-(
Having been a Sun fan for 15 years my 3 years running a JES msging and cal install have been frustrating to the extreme. I'm not sure I'll be sad to be jumping ship now tbh.
Sun needed the wow factor 3-4 years ago to stop Exchange. The Outlook connector is \*still\* bugridden and when we finally get a bug accepted it takes \*ages\* to get it fixed (bug 6520160 as an example!)

I believe that Sun's mail store is one of the best in the business. The problem is that users don't care that it makes my job way easier to use your product. To them it is all about how they use the client software. This looks promising. I just hope we can all upgrade from 2005Q4 to the new version, with a "so simple your mom could do it" upgrade path. I also hope that it won't be 2010Q4 before we see the product.

I looked at the link you provided for the Comms V 5, and when I look at the messaging and calendaring pages they both say you can download and use the systems for free, pay for support. However when I look at the FAQ for calendaring it has a licensing price entry of $50 per employee and no mention of use for free. Which is the correct statement? I want to implement this on my personal mail domain (way over kill I know - but it keeps my familiarity up :-)) but I don't want to run it unlicensed.

In response to Liam's question about licensing: all comms products can be run free of charge. So if you want to run it at home, you can do so and not feel guilty. I suspect the referenced FAQ is simply out of date.